Month: December 2016

Events of the last week should give American foreign policy watchers pause. As we wind down 2016 and the end of President Obama’s term, we would expect that short of some crisis there would be no major policy statements or new initiatives. And, similarly, we would expect that the incoming President would be quiet and deferential until he took office just after the turn of the New Year.

There are hundreds of federal regulations that are implemented every year. They run the gamut from regulations on food safety, environmental protection and drug safety to the more ridiculous. So why do we hear so much about how government regulation hurts the economy?

The President-elect has been selecting his cabinet nominees since his election in early November. If we include the UN Ambassador and the head of the National Security Council, there are seventeen members in the President’s cabinet. As is often the case for incoming Presidents, there have been a couple of unorthodox selections by the President-elect. Interestingly however, among the most controversial, among liberals at least, has been the fact that there are three former military generals nominated. President-elect Trump has chosen former career military officers to lead the National Security Council, and the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. Continue reading “When Discrimination Is OK?”

We all now have had to time to digest the presidential election results from last month. Judging by the news, some of us still can’t get over it but at some point we are going to move on (assuming of course, we believe in democratic elections).

Isn’t it ironic and deeply hypocritical of both major party candidates when we watch how they react to the election results? Hillary’s supporters protest and riot over the results, to the point of burning cop cars and trashing businesses, because of course they are concerned the violence that a Trump presidency will foster. And these are the same people that only a couple of weeks earlier said that Donald Trump was striking at American democracy itself when he said he wasn’t sure that he would accept the election results. But, not to be outdone, after saying he may not accept the results, Trump has now called the Cllinton campaign and their backers ‘ridiculous’ (and much more) for doing exactly what he said he might do. (as an aside, isn’t this a microcosm of what was the whole problem with the choices we had in this election?)